In a protest letter to Mr Cameron, Malcolm Colling, President of the Association of Independent Officials in the Commission, urged him to "rise above petty polemics" and halt the attacks on EU staff. He said the 23,800 Commission officials were outnumbered by the 33,000 staff employed by Leeds City Council.

The bill for Brussels is not actually enormous. The entire cost of running the EU and all its development, aid, research and subsidy programs amounts to only 1 percent of the bloc's gross domestic product. In most member states, government spending takes up nearer 40-50 percent of GDP.

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Administration is just 6 percent of the EU budget, and there is evidence the Commission has cut back. Officials say they began tightening their belts long before the crisis. A fraud and cronyism scandal in 1999, which forced all the EU's commissioners to resign, triggered a shake-up of how the institution and its administration is run.

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The changes triggered a decline in the purchasing power of EU officials, according to figures provided by the Commission. Now it says it doesn't pay enough to attract as many qualified staff from richer western European countries as it needs. The Commission has proposed to peg its administrative costs to inflation for five years, and aims to cut staff by 1 percent a year, saying this will help save one billion euros by 2020.

Entry level wage cuts, increasingly fixed-term contracts rather than permanent employment, outsourcing of functions... the same logic of (mis)management is applied to firms, national governments, and the EU bureaucracy.